What to look for in Parkland's next CEO

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Ricardo Brazziell/AP

Construction at the new Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

Published: 31 October 2013 03:41 PM

Updated: 01 November 2013 10:20 AM

As Parkland Memorial Hospital conducts its search for a new CEO, the Editorial Department has asked experts, both from across the nation and locally: “What kind of leader does Parkland need to emerge as a stronger public hospital?” Here are the essays we have published over the past year:

Pronovost, Johns Hopkins Medicine senior vice president for patient safety and quality, wrote: “The key values of the next CEO should be humility, courage and love — and these values must guide the leader’s behavior.”

Parkland needs employees to feel ownership, says Makary, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “No matter how much good medical care is delivered, the intangible culture of patient safety — the sense of treating each patient as you would your own family member — is the safety net that makes a hospital great.”

Parkland needs an inspiring servant leader, says Dallas County Judge Jenkins: “Parkland is turning around because its people have been working tirelessly to get the job done. Now they need a CEO who can lead them into the future. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.’ ”

Fagadau, a Dallas eye surgeon and former chairman of the North Texas Underinsured Healthcare Coalition, writes that "the new CEO should understand that Parkland alone cannot meet the diverse, complex needs that assure a robust workforce and an energized economy. Parkland and North Texas need to come together to harness the power of community collaboration."

Ramanujam, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University who specializes in operational failures in high-risk work settings, says that "whoever lands in the top job at Parkland should have a mind-set not of fixing a long list of problems but rather of redesigning structures and processes in a way that delivers care that is safer, more cost-effective and, most important, patient-focused.

While technical and operational skills are important, our board felt the
leader we needed would surround himself or herself with capable people
and have the good sense to listen to them. In our judgment, the skills
we sought transcended the traditional CEO profile and lent themselves to
inspirational and transformative leadership. We wanted someone who
would drive cultural change within the organization and recast the
hospital’s relationship with the community.

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